As the cart trundled along uneven paths, the evening turned to night, the darkness beneath his blindfold deepened, the crickets came out and tuned their ensembles. Several hours must’ve passed before the oxcart finally stopped. Tun felt a pair of hands loosen the rope around his ankles. Another hand urged him off the cart. He stood swaying for a moment before regaining his balance. They took turns shoving him forward and he waddled barefooted, his car-tire sandals abandoned on the oxcart, until they paused at what sounded like a wooden door creaking open. A final shove, and the door banged shut. The rattle of metal chain and lock. He was on a hard cement floor, alone in pitch-blackness, imprisoned within layer upon layer of incomprehensibility.
The first blow came in the middle of the night. He thought the roof had collapsed. A white brightness flooded the room, blinding him. A flashlight in his eyes, the blindfold having slipped to his nose. Then came the second blow, a rifle butt to the side of his head. Blood seeped through his hair and down his cheekbone. Confess your crime! He tried to tell them he’d committed no crime, but this only earned him a kick in his chest. Still he persisted, and still they were not convinced. More kicks, more blows, until he heaved against the cement with only enough breath to utter, W-w-what crime? The answer was more devastating than the violence they’d rained down on him: You’ve had an immoral relationship with your daughter. We’ve seen you hug. As you said, she is twelve, not a little baby. She doesn’t need to be comforted in such a way. It is immoral. This kind of love—between father and daughter—is impure. She’s also arrested, and if you don’t want her to suffer like you, then you must confess your crime—all your crimes, including your traitorous connections, everyone in your ksae kbot, your string of traitors and betrayals . . .
By then, his heart had stopped.
*
What is today’s date, Comrade? Now that the answer has come to him, he wishes he could laugh. Memory is the enemy, the serial traitor. It betrays him again and again. Yet, he never learns. He forgets. He forgets that no one is safe—no man, woman, or child. He forgets that anything you do, or do not do, can be seen as a crime. He forgets that once accused, you are guilty, and everyone you know is culpable by association. He forgets, he forgot. He told them what they wanted to know—how he came to be linked to the traitor So Phim, where he’d first heard of the man, why he’d chosen to settle in Chhlong . . . He told them the truths and the lies, all they wanted him to admit. Isn’t it true that you’d been under that traitor’s command from the beginning? Wasn’t this the reason you chose Chhlong, a district in his zone, so that you could continue to plot against the Organization with him and others in his network? Who else do you know? Give us names—everyone you once knew, everyone you know now, all the people you’ve ever known. If you don’t give us enough names to add to your ksae . . . Let’s put it this way—do you want your daughter to die? It is as simple as that, you see.
Again, memory deserted him, and he forgot all over again the evil they could do. So he told them, writing confession after confession, list after list. Countless names. Some real, others invented. But it made no difference. All the truths he’d purged, the lies he’d conjured. They murdered her anyway and threw her in the Mekong. Now she could swim with the dolphins, they told him, laughing. They’d defiled her, he learned in another round of beating. In this way, they made truth of their lies. The party is that powerful. He ought to remember.
Tun turns in his cell, bumping into a wall either way. It’s not the same cell they threw him into that night after his arrest. This is Sala Slak Daek. They’ve brought him from Kratie to Kompong Thom, to a proper santebal—a security center. Chhlong is far away, and he would like to forget it, forget his entire life. But he cannot. Memory is deceitful.
He hears a moan in the adjacent cell and, against his will, remembers it is Sokhon. Aung Sokhon. One of the many names his memory betrayed. A life he exchanged in the desperate hope to save his daughter’s. He loved her. Purely, profoundly. Innocently.
But love is no excuse.
Asingle throb in her heart, like a drumbeat. She wakes. Where am I? . . . It takes Teera some seconds to be fully conscious of her surroundings. Beside her, Lah is facedown under the cover, one arm around the purple silk elephant they bought at the hotel gift shop, the other hanging off the side of the bed. Seeing the child in her bed, Teera wonders, how can so small a life exert such hold, such sense of anchoring, upon her own?
She leans over the child to look, and sure enough, Narunn has been edged off and is napping on the floor, elbow draped over his forehead, hand tentatively clasping Lah’s. Again, Teera’s heart throbs, the cartography of love, its ever-expanding frontiers.
A drum echoes, the same sound that woke her, that she’d mistaken for her own heartbeat. Quietly, she rises and steps through the glass door onto the balcony, following the sound. On the grassy lawn adjacent to the children’s pool, a group of adolescents are arranging musical instruments on a raised platform for a performance later this evening, it seems. The large placard on an easel to the side says it is an ensemble of “former street children” trained by a local NGO specializing in traditional music. In the middle of the arrangement, the oldest-looking of the children—a boy about fourteen—hits a painted sampho, first with his left hand, then his right, alternately testing each head of the barrel drum. It’s twice as big as the one in the Old Musician’s care.
The Old Musician. He lingers always at the periphery of consciousness, more persistent than the ghosts. Teera sighs . . . She hasn’t been able to stop thinking of him since their return several hours ago from Phnom Tamao.
Leaving the wildlife sanctuary, they’d intended to drop Lah back at the temple as planned, but when they telephoned the Venerable Kong Oul to say they were on their way, he informed them that the Old Musician hadn’t yet come back from the city, which meant Teera wouldn’t be able to see him. Just as well, she thought. She was tired, they all were, so she asked the abbot if it would be all right to take Lah to the hotel and keep her for the night. The abbot couldn’t have been more delighted. It is now dusk, and Teera wonders if the Old Musician has returned to the temple. She’d been dreaming of him when she suddenly woke to the sound of the drum. She can’t recall a single detail of the dream. Surely the abbot would call if anything happened.
She goes back inside and checks her cell phone. There’s no missed call. She unmutes it, just in case. Then she walks to where Narunn lies on the floor and, brushing her lips against his, whispers, “Hey, sleepy head.”
He stirs, opens one eye, then the other. “Hey, sleepy heart . . .”
She laughs. He gives a quick glance at the child, whose hand is still in his, and to Teera says, his voice unusually clear for someone just waking, “Let’s go to Siem Reap. Let’s take her with us.”
“What?”